Saturday, May 23, 2015

I’ve always felt a fascination with the concept of a homing
pigeon. There is something somehow very noble about “returning to your home.” One of the most famous movie lines is “ET, go home!”

We all somewhere deep in our hearts have a yearning to “go
home.” Buried deep in our souls, the essence of our being, something is
flickering. We want to “return home.” What is that? For me it means returning
to the God who created me. I believe we have all been separated from our
source, or original love.

So this proof, #84, is about Homing Pigeons. I’m sure you
have heard of them. Maybe you don’t know that they are a huge worldwide sport. Millions
of people train them and have big races with them for big prizes.

"Pigeons are incredibly complex and intelligent
animals. They are one of only a small number of species to pass the ‘mirror
test’ – a test of self-recognition. They can also recognize each letter of the
human alphabet, differentiate between photographs, and even distinguish
different humans within a photograph." [1]

"Researchers in England devised incredibly complex
devices to test the intelligence of all types of birds. Pigeons came out on
top." [2]

"Pigeons have strong muscles used for flying. They can
fly at the altitude of 6,000 feet. Pigeons can move their wings ten times per
second and maintain heartbeats at the rate of 600 times per minute, during a
period of 16 hours. Pigeons can fly at the speed of 50 to 60 miles per hour. The
fastest known pigeon managed to reach a speed on 92 miles per hour. Because of
their incredible speed and endurance, pigeons are used for racing. The Winner
of a 400 miles long race can earn a million dollars." [3] About 5 such
races are held each year somewhere in the world.

“In modern times the pigeon has been used to great effect
during wartime. In both the First and Second World Wars the pigeon saved
hundreds of thousands of human lives by carrying messages across enemy lines.”
[4] Pigeons have been carrying messages for humans as far back as 500BC. New
evidence suggests they were domesticated by Egyptians some 12,000 years ago. [5]

Pigeons trained for racing often fly about 700 miles in a
day. [6] The longest distance ever recorded was in the late 1800’s for a homing
pigeon that flew over 7,000 miles back home, going from Africa to England,
taking over 55 days.

How can the Theory of Evolution (or any other theory without
God) explain the development of this ability of a simple bird to find its way
home? Even more so, how could this have developed over a slow and gradual
process taking generations and generations of mutations and natural selection?

Birds have to find food each day to survive regardless of
where they happen to be. Why not just stay there? How does natural selection
choose a place far, far away as more beneficial? What’s the benefit? Especially
if they have never been to that other place before, it could not be selected.
And if they started out in the other place, how did they get so lost?

Travel over a long distance is dangerous and risky. It’s not
likely to be a choice of some unintelligent law of natural selection when compared
to staying in one place if there is food. What other criteria could exist for
unintelligent selection, perhaps shelter or reproduction? Neither is likely to
cause the “homing” ability we are discussing to be able to develop.

Another issue is concerning the exact mechanism that allows
them to be able to “go home.” Various theories exist but no one really knows
for sure! Not yet anyway.

Researchers originally thought they had some “map” in their
brains and they relied on the magnetic fields of the earth. But scientists have
been able to design ways to shield them from the magnetic fields and also to
disable the parts of their brains that are sensitive to it. Still they could
“go home.” So that may be a dead end.

The latest approach is focused on their ability to smell
their way home. No kidding. I have a hard time comprehending the ability of a
bird to smell its way for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. I believe God can
create some amazing creatures, but they didn’t come into existence by accident.

“The researchers saddled a group of homing pigeons with GPS
tracking devices, placed a rubber plug in either their right or left nostrils,
and released them 25 miles outside of their home in Pisa, Italy. Pigeons with
their left nostrils blocked had a little more trouble navigating than
clear-nosed pigeons, but eventually made it home. Birds with their right
nostrils blocked made it back, too, but they stopped more often and took an
even more circular route than the others. The researchers believe that the birds
needed time to gather more smells and construct a map based on odors in the
wind. And the finding that the right nostril is the better sniffer suggests
that the right and left hemispheres of bird brains have different functions.” [8]

Other scientists believe pigeons have ears that can hear the
sound of wind over mountains hundreds of miles away. This may be of help in
guiding them. Research shows they do actually hear sounds 11 octaves below
middle C which is in the range to detect earthquakes and electrical storms.[9]

To believe that pigeons accidentally evolved such a homing
mechanism which is so complicated that research scientists cannot understand it
takes astounding faith. Think about what is going on in that pigeon’s brain for
a few minutes. (Recommended reading for more understanding: “For Everything a
Reason: Why Ants Walk Crooked and Pigeons Circle Around” [10]). If a pigeon
brain is using smells or hearing or the earth’s magnetic fields, it must be
able to #1 differentiate very tiny, tiny variations. And it must be able to #2
assign meaning to the differences. Then it must be able to #3 make a decision
how to prioritize the data. Then finally the pigeon brain must be able to #4
initiate its own actions based on its analysis. Wow.

All the above arguments should be convincing enough that God
created pigeons, but I have one last, and I think, best argument. Think about
this: Pigeons in the wild never use a long distance “homing” ability. They never
get lost.

They don’t need this ability in the wild. Why not? They live,
eat, grow old, and die in the areas where they are born. Natural selection
cannot explain the development of an ability that is never used and has no survival
value.

Homing pigeons don’t get lost hundreds of miles from home
and then have to search for home. This only happens because of interference by
men and women. Amazingly, homing pigeons somehow have incredible capability that
they would never normally use in the wild. They only use it when they receive
training from people who have learned how to train them.

Homing pigeons must be trained step by step. [11] You first
have to train them by acclimating them to the desired “home” or roost. You must
keep them locked up for at least 4 weeks. Then gradually take them farther and
farther away and see if they can make it back home. Some do, some don’t. If you
attach a GPS tracker and let them go at the same distant location many times,
you will see that they take many different routes home, but gradually get
better and better at it.

Pigeons in the wild never needed to develop the ability to
“go home” by natural selection or mutation or any other reason because they
were always already home. So how could they ever develop an ability that was
never put to use in any way. There is no survival value in it. Pigeons in the
wild don’t ever wander hundreds of miles from their home AND GET LOST. The
ability is useless to them in the wild, but nonetheless they have this ability.
That it would or could develop by evolution does not make any sense.

Natural selection requires that an ability get passed from
generation to generation because of being selected by survival of the fittest.
If the “go home” ability is never used, how could it get passed from generation
to generation by natural selection? There is no survival value.

The homing ability of the pigeon is a creation of God that
is a teaching tool for us. It shows us what we have in our own souls. We have
an innate, undeniable, un-erasable desire to “go home.” Where is home? It is
back to God.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

This proof is about one of the most important parts of your
brain. It may be the answer to the question of why some people cannot accept
that there is a God while for others it is as plain as the nose on your face.

In a previous article I wrote about how miraculous and
astounding our brains are [1]. This article is about just one part of the brain
which is about the size of your finger. It is located at the top of the spinal
column at the base of the brain stem.

Its job is like a gatekeeper for the signals that are coming
in to your brain. As you can imagine, you have millions upon millions of nerve
cells that are reporting every second to your brain about sounds, smells,
tastes, touches, or sights from whatever they are connected to, like your
fingertips, your stomach, your leg muscles, your bladder, well…everything.

Your conscious brain can only handle about 130 messages per
second [2] in any meaningful way, so it absolutely needs some way to sort out
what is important and prioritize those millions of messages coming from your
body. Your RAS is what limits the messages down to the manageable flow.

That’s the purpose of the RAS, the Reticular Activating
System. Most nerves run through the RAS and then get sent out to various other
parts of the brain for the interpretation of their signals.

"The ability to filter out information from external
sources and focus on one particular fact, detail, or thought is controlled by
this brain region. If it weren't for this circuitry, our consciousness would be
overwhelmed and flooded with all sensory information, leading to an inability
to make decisions." [3]

As a simple example of how the RAS prioritizes, think about
when you get pain. It immediately gets sent to the front of the consciousness
so it can be analyzed and responded to.

But that’s not all the RAS does. It is able to learn from
the conscious mind what to look for in the environment. Look at this picture
and see how quickly you can find one of the two letter “L's” in this diagram.

Probably you did not have to look at every single letter one
by one. Also, have you ever looked for your spouse or child in a huge crowd of
people? You found them quickly by scanning which is what the RAS does.

Thus the RAS it turns out is the major goal seeking
mechanism in our brains. We can tell it what to look for and it will help us
find it. In fact once your RAS is instructed what to look for, whether told
consciously or even unconsciously, your RAS will be seeking without you even
knowing it.

I’m sure you have heard of the “Law of Attraction”. The RAS
is the brain mechanism that allows it to work. It sorts through all the inputs from
your environment and brings to your attention what you are looking for.

You’ve also heard of a “Self Fulfilling Prophecy”. What you are
looking for is what you will get because you unconsciously programmed your RAS to find it.

The other thing the RAS does, which we are usually
unconscious of, is ignore information and input that we don’t want. We think we
are seeing “objective truth”, but it is already filtered before it gets to our
conscious brain. The RAS prevents you from “seeing” information that you don’t
want to see.

Hence, an evolutionist has set his RAS to reject any
information that supports creationism and only perceive “facts” that support
evolution. He doesn’t even see evidence contrary to his beliefs because he has
told his RAS that he doesn’t want to see it. It becomes a “blind spot”.

One additional comment I want to add, but there is a lot
more, is that some researchers believe that whether you are an introvert or an
extrovert depends largely on the amount of nerve fibers which are developed in
your RAS. [4]

I encourage you to learn more on your own about this amazing
part of your brain, the RAS.

So back to the purpose of this article. Is it possible for
the RAS to have evolved, or is it clearly evidence of design by God?

According to the Theory of Evolution, in some ancient low
level species, totally by random accident, a mechanism developed that could
sort out differences between incoming signals from nerves. This mechanism gets
passed from generation to generation until another random mutation occurs. This
mutation allows the mechanism to recognize a certain signal as really important
for survival, i.e. pain for example. And then it somehow is able to prioritize
that signal over any others.

This is good so natural selection keeps it going for
generation after generation. Then another random mutation somehow recognizes a
different nerve signal as hunger. It randomly figures out how to prioritize
pain as more important than hunger. This beneficial mutation gets passed down
generation after generation.

Eventually this mechanism is able to differentiate millions
of nerve signals into which ones are really urgent, which have high priority,
and so forth down to low priority. Note that there are about 100 billion
neurons in the brain and each one has about 10,000 connections to other
neurons. Also each neuron fires about 5 to 50 times per second. [5] Then, the
mechanism randomly mutates again, and again, and again so that it lets only 130 signals pass each second.

Then all the other organisms that don’t have this ability
die out so that this is the only one that keeps reproducing. Since we all have
RAS in our brains, we have to assume we all came from the original ancestor
species (even an original couple) that first mutated a fully functioning
RAS.

In fact, since most animal species have this RAS ability,
the mutations effected all “branches” of the tree of evolution.

Bunk.

No process of mutation over generations has ever produced a
viable new species [6], let alone a complex development of differentiation and prioritization
of nerve impulses that could result in the RAS.

About Me

Welcome to 101 Proofs For God for the "common man" This Blog was inspired by a prayer where I asked God how I could help Him and experienced a deeply lonely heart for His children. Hopefully my inspirations might tweak your thinking about the things all around you in this world.
Each proof should be just short enough for a 1 to 2 minute read.
May God bless you immensely and may you draw closer to Him every day. - Jim Stephens